Archive for the ‘Whole_Foods’ tag

The real estate website Zillow has published a book which analyzes home values based on certain factors, such as the proximity to a Whole Foods, or Starbucks, etc. In a shocking coincidence, there are 2 Whole Foods within a mile of me (and three more slightly more than a mile away), there are 2 Trader Joe’s about a mile away, and a mind-boggling 44 ((!!) Starbucks within 1 mile of me, all per Google Maps. Perhaps there is a synergistic effect on property values, and a wealthy businessman from Shanghai will offer to purchase my place sight unseen for way, way above market value enabling me to retire to a private island in the Caribbean to work on my screenplay, or something. Do you know any wealthy industrialists with a desire to own a loft?

Your local grocery market has a lot to do with what happens in your local housing market, according to a new analysis by Zillow featured in the paperback edition of Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate (Grand Central Publishing, Jan. 26).

Specifically, Zillow found that homes grow more rapidly in value if they are closer to a Trader Joe’s or Whole Foodsi. Between 1997 and 2014, homes near the two grocery chains were consistently worth more than the median U.S. home. By the end of 2014, homes within a mile of either store were worth more than twice as much as the median home in the rest of the country.

“Like Starbucks, the stores have become an amenity in their own right – a signal to the home-buying public that the neighborhood they’re located in is desirable, perhaps up-and-coming, and definitely improving,” said Zillow Group Chief Economist Stan Humphries. “Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the stores may actually drive home prices. Even if they open in neighborhoods where home prices have lagged those in the wider city, they start to outperform the city overall once the stores arrive.”

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“The grocery store phenomenon is about more than groceries,” said Rascoff. “It says something about the way people want to live – in the type of neighborhood favored by the generations buying homes now. Today’s homebuyers seek things in neighborhoods that weren’t even in real estate agents’ vocabularies a generation ago: walkability, community, new urbanism – and maybe we should add words like sustainable seafood and organic pears.”

Zillow analyzed the values of millions of homes near dozens of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods to conclude that grocery stores and home values are definitely related.

According to the Zillow analysisii, the median home within a mile of a future Whole Foods store appreciates more slowly than other homes in the same city before the store opens. In the months before the stores open, the trend reverses and flips, so that after the stores’ opening dates, homes near Whole Foods appreciate more quickly than other area homes.

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The analysis clearly shows that homes near the stores appreciate more quickly than homes in the city as a whole. That means the two brands are very good at choosing locations that will appreciate faster in the future, or are actually spurring home appreciation growth – or some combination of the two.

A few interesting links collected November 15th through November 18th:

Apocalypse Now /Redux :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews – In a note released with the film, Coppola emphasizes that this new material was not simply shoehorned into the original version of the film, but that “Redux” is “a new rendition of the movie from scratch.” He and his longtime editor Walter Murch “re-edited the film from the original unedited raw footage — the dailies,” he says, and so possibly even some of the shots that look familiar to us are different takes than the ones we saw before.

She’s real, all right, and I’m sitting on the bed next to her. Her name is Dr Brooke Magnanti. Her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. She is part of a team researching the effects of exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos on foetuses and infants.

From 2003 to late 2004, Brooke worked as a prostitute via a London escort agency; she started blogging as Belle de Jour — after the Buñuel film starring Catherine Deneuve as a well-to-do housewife who has sex for money because she’s bored — shortly into her career as a call girl, after an incident she thought funny enough to write down.

Oh great, so every meal I eat out has been with contaminated garlic and/or ginger (seemingly a staple of my diet). Where’s the FDA been anyway? Wouldn’t you like to read a headline about how the FDA protected consumers before an event, not after? In fact, the FDA isn’t even mentioned in this story. What agency is taking the lead in protecting American food from poison?1

The Chinese government has ordered numerous facilities in Shandong province, a hub for the nation’s agricultural exports, to stop shipping the foods until they can abide by tougher safety standards, according to several U.S. companies that import the products from China. The move has curtailed the supply of garlic and ginger in the U.S., resulting in higher prices as buyers shift to alternative sources.

China’s action follows a host of import-safety incidents in the U.S., including a July recall of fresh ginger, tainted with an illegal insecticide, that was imported from China by a California company and sold in at least two dozen supermarkets.

China is a major supplier of garlic and ginger to the U.S., which is finicky about the Chinese-grown produce it allows into its borders. China accounts for more than 80% of garlic imported into the U.S., according to the U.S. government. Hawaii is the only source of ginger farmed in the U.S., so the country depends heavily on exports from China. In the wake of China’s action, California garlic growers are enjoying increased demand, as are Brazilian ginger growers, according to U.S. buyers.

Apparently still a problem in 2009:

At Whole Foods, for example, labels that read “USDA inspected” are stuck to produce imported from abroad. According to “Behind the Bean,” a recent study by Wisconsin’s Cornucopia Institute, the USDA’s record with food imported from China is fraught with irregularities.

“(USDA) found multiple non-compliances of the federal organic standards, (including) the failure of one certifying agent to hire Chinese inspectors that are adequately familiar with the USDA organic standards, and the failure by another organic certifying agent to provide a written and translated copy of the USDA organic standards to all clients applying for certification.

This raises serious concerns about whether foods grown organically in China follow the same USDA organic standards with which we require American farmers to comply.”

A stand at my local farmers’ market has a sign that says “Boycott Chinese Garlic.” China currently supplies 75 percent of the garlic sold in the United States, for an average price of 50 cents a pound. Two years ago, it was 25 cents a pound.

Even with the price of garlic up from 25 to 50 cents a pound, garlic-growing regions like Gilroy, Calif., are hurting. Gilroy once was known as the nation’s garlic capital.

In addition to garlic cultivation, a retail empire was built on value-added products made with garlic. Now, Gilroy is just a garlic-processing capital, as most of its supply comes fromChina.

By the time the shiny new Whole Foods Market in Lincoln Park opens May 20, the shelves will be fully stocked, the produce bins piled high and the wine-sampling machines filled with assorted bottles of vino.
That wasn’t the state of affairs when I checked out the store at 1550 N. Kingsbury St. during a hard-hat tour May 13. But I did get a fine aerobic workout hoofing it from the store’s main entrance to the in-house bakery that’s destined to perfume its corner of the 75,000-square-foot store with baked-fresh-daily breads. (Don’t believe me? I counted 200 strides.)

The Lincoln Park site’s vast space makes it the third largest Whole Foods Market in the world, just behind London’s Kensington store (at more than 100,000 square feet) and the Austin, Texas flagship store/HQ. “It’s a Whole Foods Market on soy protein powder,” says Rich Howley, the store team leader

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And if Howley’s discussions pan out, they may hold yoga and tai chi classes on the building’s roof.

Perhaps it is because I moved to Austin the same year that Whole Foods opened its first store, or perhaps because I’ve shopped at the (old) Lincoln Park location for nearly as long as I’ve lived in Chicago, but I want Whole Foods to do well, to survive and thrive, selling quality food that wasn’t created in a Monsanto laboratory. However, I do wonder if having such a monstrous location is really a good thing. I hate going to shopping malls, have avoided stepping foot in a Wal-Mart so far in my life, so why would I want to go to a grocery mall? The new Whole Foods mega-store has 42 checkout lanes, and 400 parking spaces!